Week 58 - TR1203

Once again my work has absorbed any possibility of keeping up with the blog. So now, just shy of 2 months behind schedule, I will pick up with Week 58, the last full week of September and also my birthday...

It's fascinating to me that my birthday gift was once again on a Sunday. It is amazing that at my age I have only had just a few birthdays on a Sunday. Nothing special about a Sunday, although it's nice to have your birthday on a weekend, but just in general like counting the sunsets you will see during your lifetime, the number of times you will have your birthday on a specific day of the week paints in start contrast to the busy world the inevitability of that hourglass of life sifting sand. So when people ask me how it feels to be a year older, I usually just shrug and say it's not any different. But inside, I am wondering if what I did with the past year was worthy of my lease on life.

My loving family blessed me with great gifts, including a baby bike wagon for Hannah and our outings together next year will be a treasure to me. I also got an automatic reciprocating saw, a road bike, some beer and a handmade picture from Hannah courtesy of my wife's creativity. But the greatest gift was the ending of my long-drawn trial for my doctoral research. We started the project back in April and pretty much everything that could go wrong over the summer did, even as far fetched as arcing wires, power outages and random precipitant indoors. But the project finally ended this week and I feel so relieved to be done. Another few projects loom in the near future but I just want to sleep in next week, skip work and clean up around the house. I want to be able to take Hannah to daycare more often and hold her longer at night. I want to stay up with my wife and do nothing work-related after 5 o'clock until I forget the stress of this. I just want time with my family for a while. Our little girl is growing up so fast!

Hannah looks so thrilled, but I know someday she will really like this.

This weekend we also finally fixed the hole melted in the backside of the house's siding. My brother-in-law figured out how to get up underneath the lip of the siding above the damaged area. This decreased how much siding we had to rip off the house by 2/3 and turned the afternoon job into a 1-person 2 hour task over beer and coffee. Sure, more people were involved in the work, and sure, we still had to pay for the siding, but it felt like a bit of victory to have it done, done well and done quickly.

Before we made the repair.

After the repair was finished.

The rest of the weekend consisted of trash burning and sitting inside watching my little girl sleep while I cleaned up odds and ends around the house. She will be baptized in just 2 weeks and we have to put the house together to prepare for the party we are throwing here afterwards. On Saturday morning, my father-in-law asked if I wanted to go to the Wisconsin game with him and I agreed without debate. It turned out to be a close game, thanks to Miller's TO streak and the inability of the Buckeye secondary to stop the slant route. But we came away with a win and I had a great time at the game.

This fire was too hot to stand any closer, but Betsy didn't care.

This will always be the best band in the land.

Just one example of the great moving formations done by The Ohio State Marching Band.

Finally, for those of you who don't know, I've been dieting since April, trying to lose weight and increase my bike speed and off-road agility. While both of these have improved with workouts, my dieting has only led to calorie-counting misery when eating great food and too much time on my iPhone Apps tracking my intake and weight instead of sitting and enjoying time with my wife and daughter. Caution goes to the wind anyhow when I'm out celebrating like I was this week. So as of this week I am done watching my caloric intake. Besides, there is definitely more to losing weight than calories since I already knew I wasn't really eating too much beyond the range of my needs. But if you ever need a recommendation for a weight-tracker app, I highly suggest "LoseIt". It is simple and efficient, and the inaccuracies are equivalent to any other weight loss model anyway. For me, I will always have one trick up my sleeve to losing weight, but I'm not ready to give up my addiction to Dr. Pepper quite yet.

Week 57 - Buses

The first county fair for Hannah continues this week with the cattle shows, and two livestock sales. Now that the weather is starting to cool off, we get to dress her up in fun little sweatshirts like the owl at right (I think it looks a bit more like a dinosaur...) Not many babies can say that they were already at 2 livestock shows before they were even 3 months old. But not many are progeny of these parents. A long time ago, people started calling us the "power couple" in the 4-H circles. I'm not so sure about that, nor do I think that A. B. Graham would approve of that designation for anyone. But I do think that 4-H will have a strong influence on our little girl's life, like it has for both of us. Heck, it's the whole reason my wife and I are even together or met each other in the first place. And I am grateful that I was led down this road to this lifestyle. I have lifelong friendships of depth and quality that some people will never experience in their lives.

My home base as a county fair photographer.

This week was also our baby's 3 month birthday!

This week was also Hannah's 3-month birthday. It is absolutely unbelievable to me that so much time has passed already; every day is such a treasure and I try not to think about how we will never get to rewind this experience. Instead, I focus on capturing the memories and holding on to them so I will remember in my older age when my wife and I are sitting out drinking tea on some porch. And she is growing so fast! Hannah was able to sit up (sort of) long enough to get the picture taken this time, and while we got lots of smiles and giggles out of her (she is always such a happy baby), I kind of like the serious picture for a change. She exhibits such diversity of emotion and personality for a baby that it surprises me often. We will need all of God's loving support - she is going to be a spunky child, just like her mother.

This week we dressed up to support MSU over those Irish.

A pretty good view of the game, so long as it was this side of the 50.

This weekend was my first and possibly only game at the Horseshoe. I wasn't going to go because it was essentially against a highschool team, but my wife insisted that we go and enjoy the good seats that my long years of strife in grad school has earned in credit hour rank. Plus, I had to go to work on campus anyhow with the fermenters running and me bound and desperate to wrap up this trial. So we went, visited with my wife's dad and sister, and had a nice brunch with them before going in to the game. There was a pretty good crowd turn out for the game, and a special halftime show recognizing our local school for the blind with a braille script march. Oh, and we dominated the competition - 'nough said. The Urban revolution has certainly been exciting. Let's just hope that we will still be rocking when we play real teams.

A few observations that I would like to make with pictures, but before you get a bad impression I want to be clear. I really enjoyed going to the game and the view was right down by the turf and personal. Plus, it's great to get out and enjoy a sporting event with my football-crazy wife. She sure does love her Buckeyes. And she knows far more than I ever could about the stadium, the band traditions, the "superfans" like Buck-I-Man/Guy (who is super obnoxious and entitled) and the rules and flow to the game itself.

Not sure who dressed the cheer team... but great view when the team was on our end.

And then there were the perv Indians in the row in front of us. Always standing to take pictures, shooting a hundred awkward photos of the cheerleaders in weird positions, and then spending lots of time looking at them on their phones.

More of the same. Dominative play, bad cheering, and a complete rout.

Tried to get a picture of the team scoring on our endzone. Instead you can see a ref getting run over near the 3 yd. line.

As we say in EL: "A BEAUTIFUL DAY FOR FOOTBALL!"

Not chronological, but the band entrance is always so impressive and exciting.

Favorite part of this spot. Singing the "Carmen Ohio" after a victory with my wife.

As the county fair wrapped up, I made the journey up to the dirt track with the family to celebrate what has become a sort of red neck/white trash tradition. And does it ever bring the best out of the locals! Schoolbus races basically work in a figure eight pattern and can be simply put as a race to get a set number of laps completed without wrecking your bus beyond repair. It's like the greatest game of "chicken" ever, with the big time consequences of flipping, rolling, burning, crunching or ejecting each time you come around and try to get past the other guys. And man does the crowd love some good old bus crunching. In the past couple of years, we have expanded entries to pickup trucks, and I capture a few videos of this to share with you. Just scroll through for the full experience.

You can see the buses skidding around the tractor tires. Earplugs optional.

This is one of the vans on my way out - all dinged up from being the skidder and skiddee.

You can see the guys scrambling round and round. And you thought NASCAR was redneck.

More of the same experience. Round and round she goes - when the truck blows, nobody knows. But we'll all wait around and see, just hoping. It just gets so much better when the rain starts drowning us and the trucks are sliding uncontrollably to where it's faster to drive in reverse once you're spun.

And all the meanwhile, these folks behind us are screaming and cheering like banshees on heroine. Let it never be said that they lack an enthusiasm for life. Just loving it.

Week 56 - Fairtime

It's a bit tough to see it in this picture on the right, but this is the first time that Hannah has petted Betsy without the poor, confused puppy shying away from her. Now, of course the little girl didn't know she had touched the dog, she just felt the change in texture behind her. And, of course, Betsy had no idea it was Hannah who was touching her head. She just was comfortable in her place between Mom and Dad, and didn't mind whatever was going on behind her. But with comfort and decreased fear will come a growing love for her new human.

Speaking of Betsy, it's been a while since I shared any fun nuggets of life from her end. She has been happily enjoying the changes that come along with fall. Pernicious squirrels, falling leaves, the last bullfrog hurrah, and pre-hibernation varmits obsessed with eating and unaware of her approach. And then there's the frisky sheep. For those of you non-oviners, most sheep come into breeding season in the fall with the shorter days and cooling weather, similar to deer. This leads to some antics on the part of the sheep that I will not elaborate, and a protective attitude of the sheep towards their family which Betsy finds immensely entertaining. She chases and barks, then runs away, then hops through the gate and circles around behind the boss ewe. Very funny to watch, if you're not a sheep.

Another habit we've picked up in the last few weeks has been the consumption of sheep feed. The video doesn't quite do Betsy's attraction for molasses and cereal grains justice, but it's the only one I've gotten so far.

The fermenters are once again back in full swing. Of course they had to die at the end of this week, but we will start up again next week. As mad as it makes me, it does give me the opportunity to spend a bit more time working with the family at the fair, which I am grateful for. My wife and I volunteer a lot at the fair and without the extra time, it would have been even harder to take care of Hannah amidst all the chaos. It's just frustrating that the fermenters have died so many times in a row - this one due to a blocked buffer drip which killed the buffer supply and allowed the pH to rapidly decline to ~5.4 from 6.4 in 1 hour. Very severe, and listed as DOA.

My wife teaching our 4-Her how to shear a sheep for show.

So the fair started informally on Friday of this week, when we brought in the market lamb that a 4-H member has been keeping at our house all this spring and summer. "Chester" looked pretty good in my opinion, a bit light on the weight for a fall show, but he was a good lamb with some natural muscle and good structure for moving about freely. More impressive was our 4-H'er's hard work and willingness to dive right in to things she was just learning about for the first time. This summer she learned to feed, water, catch, walk, shear, clip, fit and show. Not bad for a first-timer. She embodies what the 4-H experience is really all about, and even though she didn't win in the show on Sunday, she did get a 5th place in showmanship (a test of your ability to handle your lamb) and her great work ethic is enough to be proud of on its own.

Me with my "oversize load".

I had my own competitions to enter in, none of them having to do with the live stock side of the fair. Instead, I have been entering in the photo contest for about 8 years now, and this was also my second year in the gardening contests. I was shooting for tallest sunflower since I noticed them take off towards the sun back in June and thought I had a pretty competitive stalk. So I entered and waited for the day and then had the realization that there was not a snowball's chance in July of getting the darn thing up to the fairground unscathed. We didn't own a truck or trailer, and the rest of the family was far too busy to help. So I did what any other person would do - shoved it into my '99 Corolla. Toyota should use me as the next spokesperson for roominess. It wasn't pretty, but I did get the head down in the passenger side on the floor and then run the stalks out through the window. Sure, they bounced and waved a bit, and sure, I had to go in to work first like this, but American ingenuity and stick-to-it-ness triumphs again.

For all that work, I later found out that I was a good 5-6 feet shy of the tallest sunflowers, and dead last for the largest head. Must have been a good year for the pros. But there were a few small victories on the day. My habanero peppers won first place, and my heirloom oxhart tomatoes that I started on the front porch in April with free seeds from the county extension office ended up winning both first place and best in class for all tomatoes at the fair!

Photograph was also a success. Not just because the pictures did pretty well, but more importantly because we have settled into just taking pictures that we like for ourselves, and the judges have been in some agreement over the past few years. I will close the rest of the blog out with a few of the best pictures, showcasing the wonder of this great world we live in. If you want to see more of them, check out my photo album (my wife hasn't created one yet) on Picasaweb, and remember, I reserve all rights on these photos.

Tree frog outside our house.

Draft horse team at MSU's plow day.

Tiger at the Columbus Zoo.

My wife took this of Hannah and I at the zoo for our first time.

Week 55 - Sesquicentennial

For those people who know me very well, you should expect based on the title that this blog post will be about the Civil War. But for your sake, I will keep it short. I'm a publicly confessed history buff and I even used my electives in college to take history classes for the fun of it. Hell, if I'd have thought I could get a job with a B.A. in History, I probably would have done it. But I know that my love of the books and the pivotal moments in the course of time would have to take a sideshow to my desire to work, and so history and all it encompasses are just a piece of what makes me an interesting person instead of defining my whole life. Probably for the better because those people that are obsessed with history don't tend to make any lasting positive effect on the current global issues anyway. But I ramble...

This post will serve as the finale to our Labor Day weekend trip, especially since not much of substance has happened at work (just meeting to get parts fixed and ready to start experiments again) and we spent the latter half of the week just putting the house back in shape from the summer (task not yet completed).

Over the past couple of years and for the next couple of years, the historical societies all over the U.S. have been celebrating the sesquicentennial (150 years) of the American Civil War. It's hard for us to imagine a war that terrible happening in our country now, but states fighting each other for the right to control their own legislation instead of the feds is certainly not a stale topic. What is unbelievable to me is the absurd loss of life associated with the war, the dedication that these people had to the struggle, and the ends that we had to go to in order to end it. I won't go so far as to say that the war was about every man being treated right - that was what the 1960s were about (100 years later). No, many people were probably treated worse because of the end of slavery and the poor leadership in the years that followed Lincoln's assassination. But this was a huge turning point in our country as far as both slavery and federal government assertion, the lasting effects of which are prevalent today. And it's a shame that the South let fears about slavery ending get in the way, because that made it so much easier to brand them as the bad guys, even though I often think many of their views on states' rights would have been much more appealing to us today.

But enough debate, what is not debatable is the sacrifice of Americans for this cause, on both sides of the Mason-Dixon line. And the battlefield of Gettysburg is a great place to consider all of the turmoil, suffering, and sacrifice in preservation and definition of this great nation, and the ideals of democracy which survived the fires. I am so grateful to my wife for helping to make this side-trip to Gettysburg possible. She knew that I wanted to go, and we hadn't been able to because of the birth of our daughter and the busyness of my experiment. I was so happy we could make it. This is the first time I have not been sick or in a total rush when I have been there, and I just want to share a few pictures from that day.

This is the North Carolina monument, looking out towards the Union lines on day 3. T

A close-up of the North Carolina monument.

This is the view out across the area which became known as Pickett's Charge. It is incredible to think of people who had that much courage, to charge (walk) across a mile of open ground, into cannon and musket barrage, in the hopes that your near-certain death or manglement might bring about a better country for your children.

The Virginian demi-god, Robert E. Lee, atop the Virginia memorial. Lee gave everything he had in defense of his home.

Interesting...

Monument for some guys tucked way down in the slope on Little Round Top.

20th Maine Regiment memorial.

Maine "castle" on Little Round Top.

A view down across the battlefield from the height of the Little Round Top. Its prominence was a critical spot of conflict.

More view around from the top.

Well, after the long weekend, we finally had to come home - my least favorite part. The drive was hard, and devious through the hills and we were all pretty tired by the time we got back and found my car once again dead in the driveway. Battery replacement was something that must happen this week. And I took care of it the following day, thanks to the great guys at Advance Auto Parts. I was able to get a good, cheap battery, got some help putting it in (not that I couldn't, but 2 makes it faster) and was on the road to work as if it were any other late morning.

Our little girl was happy to be home again, too.

 The rest of the week flew by as we got into a 4 day work week and caught up around the house. Football was in full swing and we made it down over the weekend to see Mirror Lake, laugh at the similarities between baby Hannah's hair and the crazy fuzzy duck that is always there. Everywhere we go with her, she steals the show with her adorable face and her smiles and laughter. New skill for the week (besides the fact that she traveled awesomely) is that I have been training her to hold her own bottle. It's not that I'm in a huge rush for this, but it definitely helps when I'm trying to get a few things done on the computer as she takes her jolly good time to eat.

Notice the duck's hair.

Notice the baby's hair.

We closed off the week with a volleyball tournament to raise money for the hungry.

3rd place team! I guess I'm getting better over the years.

Week 54 - Blackbird

Fair warning to anyone who doesn't like planes, but this post is going to be primarily all pictures of them from our trip to Dulles over Labor Day weekend. Come to think of it, this is really the first over-weekend trip we've taken anywhere since the blog, so I've had to figure out how to break apart the post to match my week requirement. So this week will be Fri-Sun of the trip, and then next week will have the cap-off at Gettysburg on Monday. But first things first... 

This week was the kickoff for college football and things are already rowdy in our house. Luckily, Friday was gameday for my Spartans, and so I dressed our little Hannah up in her first Spartan jersey, a onesie that Amanda gave me for pre-Father's Day this summer. Hannah has a long road of B1G strife ahead of her and it is only further complicated by the fact that we figured out her daycare room leader is a scUM fan. I can only imagine what cute craft she has dreamed up to send Hannah home with, painted in the hideous maize and blue. And what's with that, anyhow? M!c#!g@n, the school that was too good to teach the "lower callings" of agriculture, had the audacity to pick a school color called "maize"? And it doesn't even look good on them. I bet you, that if someone in rush hour had a maize and blue car, I would hit it by accident, just out of the pure nature of bred and raised disgust. 

But I digress... Hannah is adorable in her little green jersey, right up to the time when I drop her off. I kindly tell the lady that it would be great if they can protect it at all costs, since Mommy would really like her to spit up on it and change into a spare Buckeye onesie (which are in no short supply). All she has to do is keep it clean for 3 hours, but nope, we hear later that it was no more than 30-40 minutes after I left and the outfit was toast. We are not off to a good start for the underdogs.

I won't even pretend to waste your time with regalia from work. Every hour I punched at work this week was just in anticipation and preparation for skipping ASAP on Friday. I had nothing to watch, just petty tasks to knock out, and a lecture on ruminant microbiology and the diversity of functions within the microbiome. Killed that, besides taking just a bit too long, and booked it for the in-laws to depart on the long-awaited pilgrimage to the Smithsonian Dulles Air & Space Museum. But wait, why won't my car start? Inexplicably, my car won't start, and after trying to call every family member that might help me trouble shoot it, and being advised by my loving brother that it might blow up, I settle on the AAA. Within 10 minutes, the guy is there, I am jumped, and headed East. Didn't matter I was late, because even after stopping at the slowest McDonald's this side of the buggy delivery boy, they still weren't ready to pack up and go when I got there. No worries in the end, because traffic was light, and my Spartans weren't on the TV anyhow. We listened on the radio during a 1 hour storm delay and then while they struggled to beat Western Michigan. It's going to be another tough season to sell.

On the drive out to DC, I was playing this new game I got hooked on. A year ago, I saw this movie on YouTube highlighting train safety. 

 

About a month ago, my wife's cousin posted on her Facebook about how she was wasting the day away playing "Dumb Ways to Die" on her iPhone but I hadn't had time to chase it down. Sure enough, it is a true-to-the-video game that requires only patience and a slow day. My slow day opportunity was on the drive to DC, and the game did not disappoint. Very simple, very easy, mildly entertaining.

The home screen for my new game. When you win, new characters debark the train.

Now to the main body of work, our trip to the Smithsonian Air & Space Museum at Dulles. This isn't my first time there - we were put up for an evening there back in 2009 with National 4-H Conference - but I unbelievably didn't take any pictures of substance from that trip. I was super excited to spend more than an hour or two there and really take all the time I wanted appreciating the magnitude of aerospace history collected into one place. And while we were there, we got to see my father-in-law's name on the foils out front; the inscription just got finished.

View out the front doors of the museum with the supporters' foils.

There is really only one huge draw for me in the whole building, and that is the centerpiece SR-71 Blackbird. Back in the good old 90's, communism's darker evils still lurked after the wall fell and bad people seemed to be springing up all over that part of the world in positions of power. Meanwhile, my dad worked at an airplane manufacturing company and brought home these quarterly reports on VHS (if you don't know what that is, stop reading this blog) with demos of aviation awesomeness that we would watch and re-watch before they'd be reallocated to the National Geographic or Nova recording stack since we couldn't stay up late enough to watch those shows. In this time, I had a lot of security and faith for protection in my family, my God, and the U.S. Government with their omnipotent technology (since then, only one of those three has changed).

No plane every stood out to me as more awe-inspiring than the Blackbird. My older brother would tell me just how fast it was, before he'd make these swooshing sounds and run his model all over the house. He was right, my Blackbird would never be as fast as his, but that was because I wasn't as old. I would ask him what the point was in the plane because it didn't carry any missiles (and his were always shooting mine down), but he would tell me how it was a spy plane, so fast that nobody could see it coming. The plane symbolized the authority and superiority of the United States to the world in my eyes, and to see one in person is a wonderful thing. I could sit and just look at the plane for hours. It is so huge, fast, strong and dark, like the Batmobile in all its glory.

View of the SR-71 when you enter the museum.

Front profile of the Blackbird from the main floor.

View of the rear of the plane from the ground.

View of the plane from above. Look at the people in comparison.

Now, mind you, there are other great things to see in the museum as well. For example, the space shuttle Discovery, burned and bruised from atmospheric re-entries and ozone-ending take-offs, is housed back in the rightly named space wing. To think that the program is cancelled is sad. I know that the budget made sense and that private markets will pick up the slack. But space was the dream of every kid I knew, and I wonder what our future generations will dream of now that the U.S. doesn't believe in space anymore.

You can see how worn out much of the protection is from years of use.

So the question is who will carry on the legacy in the gap left open.

Fighter plane from WWII.

This plane was from our hometown.

This is the tactical fighter of the future, so different from the days of the Wright Brothers.

We were graced by an eloquent presentation by a gentleman on the Enola Gay, the modifications they made for it to haul the A-bomb, the practice runs they had to do in order to be accurate enough to make the hit, and all about the Manhattan Project. After about 30 minutes, we couldn't take any more info from him. My brainache reminded me of leaving orgo chem, like a sponge just seeping back out, filled to the max.

A wavy panorama of the view from the museum control tower.

This airplane does exist (2 of them! since the 60s!) I thought it was just a movie thing.

Left: First presidential helocopter (Eisenhower). Right: First female solo helocopter around the world.

First around the world flight by helocopter.

Failed attempt at a car plane.

Oldschool FedEx logo on a plane.

Dani and Hannah in Arlington.

And then we went out for dinner in Arlington to meet up with an old friend/roommate from college. It was her first time seeing little Hannah, so there is a mandatory picture of her holding Hannah in a great Italian restaurant that is brand new and right by the Metro. Seeing this picture when I loaded it back up for the blog reminds me of just how much time has changed over the years. Now we're all big kids, pursuing career paths (notice I didn't classify myself as having a "big kid job"). Back in the day when life's only priorities were to drink out the freezer stash when we moved, or get home in time to wake up for tailgating at a proper hour, or how far we would have to walk in the ice before lunch on campus - those were some good times. But these are pretty good times now, and each have their place in life. People ask me how much culture shock it was to have a baby at our age, but I'm pretty happy where I'm at now, and I wouldn't trade it for anything.

And then we went on a little mall excursion to see some of the monuments. Again, I will let the pictures speak for themselves and try to keep my conversation and ramblings short.

Scaffolding on the Washington Monument. Hopefully Congress will find it in their hearts to keep funding this.

MLK Memorial remade with the one quote removed.

One of the greatest presidents ever, Abraham Lincoln.

View out on the mall from the Lincoln Memorial. Think about how many changes this has seen over the years.

Amateur hour with my finger over the iPhone lens.

Part of the Vietnam Memorial.

You should learn something new every time you go somewhere, and this time my new fact was about this little house on the corner of the mall. This was part of the old locks intended for commercial transport near the Capitol, as a source of revenue for the Capitol. However, by the time they were finished, they were never quite that useful and were replaced by other stuff. This building is the old lockkeeper's house for the person who was in charge of monitoring the locks when they were in operation.

DAR House for our little daughter of the American Revolution.

We parked on a sidestreet near the mall and I have to say it was a great decision. Free parking on Sunday, low traffic post-March, and coincidentally near the Daughters of the American Revolution house, which our little girl will someday benefit from. Back a couple years ago, my Grandpa's niece started digging around on Ancestry.com and we all made fun of her. She found us linked to Charlemagne, pirates, German and French nobility, 3 saints, many outlaws and many others. Most of it was probably a bunch of horsecrap (I know the saints part is), especially as the farther you go back, more and more lines will converge with decreasingly convincing proofs and records. However, when she found that our family was related three of the people who fired on the British at Lexington, I was actually a little bit proud. Turns out that my compulsive, rebellious nature is gotten honest and highly heritable for about 400 years. So now my little girl is able to registered as a Daughter of the American Revolution, and linked forever to a more noble time in our country's history.

My last thought for you from the vacation is about getting off the beaten path when on a vacation. Too often we find ourselves trapped in the expectations of those more or less relaxed people who went before us, pressured into seeing "the sights" and less open to the flexibility that a vacation should have. Well, my wife is queen of scheduling flexibility and she dug up a good stop this time around, completely off the main places.

We visited the Surratt Tavern, which is closely linked to the conspiracy to kidnap Abraham Lincoln and ransom him for confederate prisoners. This attempt being failed, the plot thickened with what was ultimately the assassination which led to the death of Surratt and her son, as well as most of the rest of the crew. Lincoln being such a famous guy, there are actually quite a few places associated with the conspiracy on the South side of the District of Columbia, all famous for their own reasons. But the tavern was well restored, and we were regaled for near an hour by a costumed interpreter for a grand total of $3 per person. Beautiful, old furniture and intriguing backstory on the people involved in the assassination. I would say it was equally as good as visiting Ford's Theater, better tour, less museum, but less crowd and more relaxing.

My wife and our daughter waiting to enter the historic tavern building.

Still an important highway crossroads today.

The Surratt tavern, restored to its historic appearance.